10
The Military-Industrial
Correlates of the RMA: The
Evolution of Agile Manufacturing

Andrew Latham

INTRODUCTION

Since the late 1980s the U.S. arms industry has been characterized by far-reaching
changes in technology, technique, and organizational structure. Shaped by the
material requirements of the so-called military-technical revolution, as well as by
the discourses of flexibility and leanness, during the 1990s postfordist production
practices began to displace the essentially fordist manufacturing techniques that
had long been considered best practice in the American arms industry.
1 As a result,
a new arms production paradigm--now commonly referred to as agile
manufacturing--has coalesced in American military-industrial circles. This new
paradigm is still in embryonic form, of course, and it is likely to evolve in ways
that cannot be precisely predetermined. Even at this juncture, however, there is a
clear sense that arms production is being reconstituted around a radically new
industrial vision involving the use of computer-driven flexible machine tools, lean
production processes, and rapidly reconfigurable virtual enterprises to undertake
low-rate/low-volume production of increasingly knowledge-intensive, high-
technology weapons. As it evolves and diffuses through the U.S. armaments
industry, this new paradigm is profoundly transforming the nature and logic of
armaments production. Indeed, so profound are these changes that the transition to
agile arms production can be said to constitute nothing less than a "quiet revolution,"
marking the end of one era in America's military-industrial history and the beginning
of another.

This chapter seeks to illuminate this process of military-industrial
transformation. It argues that two powerful motive forces can be identified behind
this phenomenon. The first is practical, deriving from both the need to field the
kind of increasingly knowledge-intensive weapons deemed necessary to American
military superiority in the early twenty-first century and the need to contain costs.

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